Introduction

CP Posts Analyzer is a Windows Phone 7 application that will analyze the last
200 posts made by any CP member (across all forums, articles, surveys etc.). You
will need a developer license to be able to deploy and run this on your WP7
device, but if you don't have one, you can still run this off the emulator. I've
tested the app on the emulator as well as on a Samsung Focus.

Warning

Since the application scrapes HTML from the CP website, the application can
potentially stop functioning if the site undergoes a layout change (in the
scraped pages). Here's to hoping that, that will not happen too frequently as to
make the app tedious to maintain.

Using the app

I've included screenshots below that you can look at, but the app is quite
simple to use. When you run the app, you get a panorama view and the first page
prompts you to enter the member id (example, my member id is 20248). You can get
your member id from your profile page. Since the app does not require you to be
logged in, you can run this on any member id you want to. The app will maintain
a history of the last 10 member ids that you ran it on, so it will save you some
typing (which is not pleasant on such small devices with virtual keypads). The
recent member ids are stored using isolated storage and are thus persisted until
you uninstall the app.

When you run a fetch, the other three pages in the panorama view come into
play. The first page gives you a categories based spit up of your last 200
posts. The Lounge falls under the Page category but most other forums
including technical and some non-technical ones like the Indian forum fall under
Forum. Any posts you make on articles are classified unsurprisingly under
Article, and then you have Survey and Member
categories (self explanatory). There may be others I missed or did not
encounter, those will show up as Unknown for now.

The next page is the forum-wide split up of your posts, so you can see how
many posts you made in a specific forum. Since Chris chose to expose only the
last 200 messages you posted, that's the limit for this app too. So the app will
basically analyze your most recent posting activity. While debugging/testing the
app I found that most of mine were in the Lounge until the India-SA ODI game
happened, and then my posts in the Indian forum dominated like crazy. I ran it
on Chris and found that he spends most of his time answering questions in the
Site Bugs / Suggestions forum (he does perform a mostly thankless job I guess).

The last page in the panorama view will list all the 200 posts to give you a
quick summary of what you posted recently. Just the thread titles (not the
messages).

The app has support for tombstoning, so you can switch to another app
and come back and your state will be persisted. Well I reckon that's about it.
If you can think of something useful that I can add to the app taking into
consideration the limitation that all my input data is from html scraping, I'll
be happy to try and make that change for you (provided I have the time). Check
out a few more screenshots and then there's a brief section on the technical
implementation details.

More screenshots

CP Posts Analyzer in the application list

CP Posts Analyzer in action - running a fetch

CP Posts Analyzer in action - categories view for Roger

CP Posts Analyzer in action - forums view

CP Posts Analyzer in action - tile icon

Implementation details

The app was written in SilverLight for WP7 and the project attempts to use a
basic MVVM model. To help with data binding, I use these following types that
represent the returned data.

Just basic HTML parsing there - as you can see I had to make some high risk
assumptions (since some of the tables did not have identifiable ids associated
with them). Oh and the reason I use Enum.Parse is because WP7's
mscorlib does not have TryParse!

Tombstoning

As I mentioned earlier, the app supports tombstoning, and one of the
things I had to do was to ensure that all the types I wanted to restore were
fully compatible with serialization (which basically means they had to have
public properties along other things). Here's the code that handles
tombstoning.

I'll just mention in passing that I made some unsuccessful attempts to
serialize the entire view model and it was doomed from the very beginning. I
eventually gave up and decided to serialize what I specifically wanted. I guess
I could have got it to work but it would have been too much hassle for no return
at all, except maybe some artificially boosted self-esteem which I don't care
for anyway!

Isolated Storage

The recipients list is stored via isolated storage so your most recent 10
searches will be remembered.

The built-in support makes it incredibly easy to use isolated storage.
Initially, I did consider saving posts and then accumulating them so I can
analyze more than 200 posts, but that assumes the user will run it frequently
enough that there won't be missing posts (which was very hard to enforce,
actually quite impossible). So I gave up and thought 200 is good enough. Some
day if Chris increases that limit to 1000, then I'll update the app at that time.

Conclusion

Well that's it. It's been tested reasonably thoroughly but there may be
issues, specially on other phone models. The error handling is kinda silent, so
if it encounters any errors it won't break down but it won't tell you either. You
could try running a Fetch again, or close and re-run the app (although I
have never had to do that so far) .

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About the Author

Nish is a real nice guy who has been writing code since 1990 when he first got his hands on an 8088 with 640 KB RAM. Originally from sunny Trivandrum in India, he has been living in various places over the past few years and often thinks it’s time he settled down somewhere.

Nish has been a Microsoft Visual C++ MVP since October, 2002 - awfully nice of Microsoft, he thinks. He maintains an MVP tips and tricks web site - www.voidnish.com where you can find a consolidated list of his articles, writings and ideas on VC++, MFC, .NET and C++/CLI. Oh, and you might want to check out his blog on C++/CLI, MFC, .NET and a lot of other stuff - blog.voidnish.com.